Anthropological Field Research: Margaret Mead, Muse of the Clinical Experience

Abstract

THE PRIMARY PRODUCT OF FIELDWORK is the ethnography, a comapping of experience and mind and a simultaneous mapping of mind on mind. Fieldwork is the context within which and for which anthropological methods are devised, yet fieldwork is an orientation in time and space that is not one's own, a culture-contact situation in which the cultures we investigate may gain or lose in translation. What informs these modelic activities is just beginning to be seriously considered in anthropology. Margaret Mead welcomed this development. She herself had written, on occasion, about the nature and goals of anthropological fieldwork, ' and it is my purpose here neither to repeat or summarize her consciously expressed views that are available nor to improve on her style of expressing them, nor to say that she meant other than she expressed. Consideration here will rather be confined to what I observed as a colleague in the intimacy of fieldwork situations and discussions on the technic, and what I perceive to have been her assumptions, consciously expressed or no, of the goals and nature of anthropological fieldwork. In her occasional commentaries on method, she was not concerned with making explicit the "theological bases" of her scientific activities in the field. Because of this, some have asserted that there were no fundamental assumptions. That conclusion might easily have been reached if one came entr'acte into the intersects of her current thinking about a problem and insisted, after a brief interchange, on locating her intellectual coordinates. This would not be possible. She would never, for example, have written or spoken "The Tale of the Polyploid Horse" to illustrate a fallacy of strict "scientific" thinking of technologists as Bateson did (1979:55), but she would, in conference, refer to "Gregory's horse" and have already applied its principle. (If you didn't know about "Gregory's horse," this was a signal for you to read up on it before the next conference.) What informs the modelic activities in anthropological field research is the experiential history of the investigator and the trajectory of his intellectual history of ideation with its emphases, nurtured or not within the historic arc of determinism of his culture (Romanucci-Ross 1979). Ruth Bunzel, one of Margaret's early contemporaries, said that in the early 1920s the then-"new ethnography" ran counter to the then-current studies of institutions; it rather emphasized how individuals coped with universal problems, as, for example: What was it like to be an adolescent in another society? What can we learn from life histories and dreams? How do artists think about what they are doing? In addition, in that era there was a shared urgency to work on these problems before colonialism